Outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin thinks that the upcoming Microsoft Vista "is the most secure system that's available, and it's certainly the most secure system that we've shipped." The latter, of course, is likely to be true, but the former ... not so much. As proof, Allchin offers the following:
"My son, seven years old, runs Windows Vista, and, honestly, he doesn't have an antivirus system on his machine. His machine is locked down with parental controls, he can't download things unless it's to the places that I've said that he could do, and I'm feeling totally confident about that. That is quite a statement. I couldn't say that in Windows XP SP2."
So, all we have here is a claim that Vista is a secure system if you want to surf like a seven year old. Yes, Jim, that is quite a statement.
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Another crucially important point is that Vista is, as far as the Internet is concerned, an extremely fringe operating system at the moment. A substantion fraction, probably even the majority, of machines on the Internet run the last version of Windows... which is a big part of the reason that Windows is such a big target. Not only is there a lot of incentives for crackers to find holes, but also when a hole is found and exploited, the worm propogates fast and far. Vista will be the same way; when it's ubiquitous, any little hole found will be quickly exploited and will propogate fast and far. And there will be holes. There are always holes. No operating system has ever gone on the net without sometimes having potentially serious security flaws.
-Rob
The overwhelming majority of ordinary home and business computers could be put behind NAT routers with no loss of functionality. This would eliminate almost all worm propagation.